The door was open.

  She'd been told it would be but it still registered as something, the simple fact of a church door standing open at this hour with no one managing it, no clergy stationed at the entrance to receive visitors or assess their intentions or ensure the appropriate solemnity was being maintained. Just the door, open, the morning coming through it freely.

  She went in.

  The nave was empty.

  She stood just inside the entrance and let her eyes adjust and looked at what she'd walked into. It was smaller than she'd expected, though she didn't know what she'd expected exactly. The benches were old, the wood worn smooth in the places where generations of people had sat and darker in the places where hands had rested on the backs. The walls had cracks in them that had been there long enough to become part of the walls rather than damage to them. The windows, or rather the holes in the stone that served as windows, had curtains that moved in the morning air, the fabric old and light, shifting slowly in and out in the rhythm of something breathing.

  The sunlight came through them in long columns and fell across the benches and the floor and the cracked plaster walls and did something with all of it that light does in certain spaces at certain hours, finding the angles that made the age of things look like depth rather than wear.

  It was not an impressive church.

  It was the least impressive church she had been in, and she had been in most of the churches in Valerne because her position had required it, the formal appearances at high ceremonies in the large upper district parishes with their vaulted ceilings and commissioned stonework and Architect statues that had been sculpted by artists whose names were recorded in plaques beside their work.

  She stood in the nave of Saint Edren's and looked at the walls and the curtains and the worn benches and the dust moving slowly in the columns of light and felt something she could not immediately name.

  Not comfort exactly. Not peace. Something quieter than both of those. The feeling of a room that had held a great many people over a great many years and had not asked anything of any of them except that they come in and be whatever they were.

  She walked down the nave.

  The Architect's statue was at the far end, as it was in every church, but this one was different from the ones she knew. Not in form, the same broad-winged figure, the same smooth faceless stone, the same hand extended downward. Different in quality. The stone was older, the carving simpler, less ornamented than the commissioned works in the upper district. It had the quality of something made by someone who had been thinking about what they were making rather than how it would be received.

  The hand reached toward the floor.

  Colette looked at it for a moment.

  Then her knees found the stone and she stopped fighting the thing that had been building since the runner with the ledger three days ago and had been building faster since the letter this morning and had been building fastest since she'd walked out of Cresthold's front gate into the morning air and found that the morning air did not care about any of it.

  She let it go.

  It came out of her without shape or dignity, which was the only way it could have come because she had spent three days giving it shape and maintaining dignity and the resources for both of those things had run out somewhere between Cours Centrale and the lower district street and there was nothing left to manage it with.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  She cried the way people cry when they have stopped performing the crying and are just doing it, with her hands on the cold stone floor in front of the statue and her red hair falling forward and her high grade armor and her Aurel cape entirely irrelevant to the situation.

  "Why," she said, to the stone floor, to the statue, to whatever was or wasn't present in the space between the two. "Why did they have to die down there."

  The curtains moved in the window air.

  "They were mine," she said. "They were under my protection. They served this house and this guild and they were the best I had and I sent them down and they didn't come back and I need to understand why." Her voice broke across the last word and she let it break, she was past managing it. "Fifty-three people. Fifty-three. They had families. They had lives outside that dungeon. They had people who are waking up today in the same city I woke up in and those people are looking at a door that isn't opening and I need to know why God's protection did not extend to them."

  The statue said nothing. The hand reached toward the floor.

  "Why is it me," she said, quieter now, the question underneath all the others, the one she hadn't been able to say out loud until this room. "Why am I the one who is left. Why did everything I built over three years come apart in a single day. What did I do. What is this the result of."

  She put her forehead against the stone floor and stayed there and said nothing else for a moment, just breathed, just let the cold of the stone against her forehead be real and present and the only thing she needed to process right now.

  The curtains moved again.

  Somewhere in the back of the building, footsteps. Quiet ones, the footsteps of someone who had learned to move through this space without disturbing it, coming from a door she hadn't noticed on the right side of the nave.

  She didn't look up. She heard them stop.

  The person who had come through the door didn't speak. She could feel their presence the way you feel a person who is close and being still, the particular quality of someone who has made a decision to listen rather than intervene. She heard nothing from them except their breathing, slow and even, and the faint sound of something being set down, something she placed after a moment as a watering can.

  They had been in the garden. They had heard her from the garden and come in and were now standing in the nave of their church listening to a woman on her knees in front of the statue say the things she'd been unable to say anywhere else.

  Colette didn't look up.

  She didn't need to. She knew, from the quality of the stillness behind her, from the specific patience of it, that whoever was standing there had heard everything she'd said and was giving it the space it needed before saying anything at all.

  The curtains moved in the light.

  The dust turned slowly in the columns of sunlight coming through the window openings.

  The hand of the Architect reached toward the floor and Colette knelt below it with her forehead against the stone and let the room be what it was, which was old and quiet and full of the accumulated weight of everyone who had come here before her and found, or not found, whatever they had come looking for.

  Behind her, Edric waited.

  "Come," Edric said. "Sit with me."

  His voice was what she'd heard from the garden. Quiet, unhurried, the voice of someone who had decided the moment he'd heard her that there was no correct response to what she was saying except to be present for it.

  She lifted her head from the stone floor.

  He was standing a few feet behind her, a small watering can in one hand, his grey priest's habit slightly damp at the cuffs from the garden. He was looking at her without the expression she'd been receiving all morning, without the pity or the judgment or the uncomfortable recognition. He was looking at her the way you look at someone you've just met and have already decided deserves your full attention.

  He extended his free hand.

  She took it. He helped her up with the quiet strength of someone accustomed to helping people off floors, and he didn't comment on the state of her face or the armor or the cape or any of the things that had been drawing commentary all morning. He simply set the watering can down against the wall and led her to the front bench and sat beside her, close enough that the presence of him was real and warm, far enough that she had room to be whatever she needed to be.

  He looked at her.

  "Speak your mind, dear," he said. "What is troubling you."

  Not what happened or I heard what you said or I know who you are. Just the question, open and simple, as if whatever she said next would be received the same way regardless of its content.

  Colette looked at the statue in front of them, at the extended hand above them both.

  Then she spoke.